Sorry so long...some personal discovery... Nashville, Day Three

Yet again, how did I fit all of this into one day!?

My roommate and I started the day by attending at 7:15 breakfast meeting, part one of the Leadership Summit. We were recognized again as Young Leaders, and as a current and future officer, I was glad to be there to hear the organizational-type discussions. If only it hadn’t been so early….!

After that, I attended Martha Elliott’s session on vocal performance practice based on her book, Singing in Style. She waved to me before the session began, and in the introduction to her presentation, she recalled our conversation from last evening about how I used her book as the starting point for my research, and then she thanked me by name. I felt special – not just a face in a crowd or just one reader out of many thousand. I know, I know… it’s the little things.

In the brief time between that session and the next master class, I visited the exhibition hall and was sidelined at the first booth to chat with my regional governor, who thoughtfully invited me (and some others from our region) to a gathering in her room tomorrow evening. We started chatting about some of the presentations we had seen, and as we were discussing a technique Shirlee Emmons introduced in her master class yesterday, Ms. Emmons herself approached us. I found her to be very natural and personable, very easy to chat with and quite down to earth. I had my picture taken with her and (as with Martha Elliott’s) will print it and paste it into my copy of her book, which is at home.

Elizabeth Blades, a colleague from my chapter, wandered our way as I was getting ready to head to the master class. We sat together at Dr. Thomas Cleveland’s master class concerning the occupational hazards of singing contemporary commercial music. It was an enlightening event all around, but I personally got a kick out of hearing some of his sound clips. He was talking about how it really doesn’t matter how well or how poorly you sing if your style of singing doesn’t match the style of the music. To demonstrate he played a recording of someone singing an aria from Handel’s Messiah… with a country twang. The person singing it did not intend it to be humorous, it just kind of came out that way, despite the fine quality of the singing itself. Then, he played another recording featuring the same singer… I recognized it instantly as The Gatlin Brothers singing one of my childhood favorites, “All The Gold.” Same voice, same style, same twang, perfectly at home in its style of music. Dr. Cleveland noted that a few of us had “the audacity” to move to the music; under my breath, I muttered, “and sing every word along with him, thank you very much!” He was being facetious, but as Robert Edwin said in yesterday’s master class that combined classical and CCM singers, “it’s kind of like getting the Lutherans and Roman Catholics together.”

After lunch, I attended a short publisher’s showcase featuring Joan Frey Boytim, a “household name” to any teacher of young singers. She just released some new books, and we received one of them as a gift, plus a book of Schubert songs. Can never go wrong with that!

Next was the master class with Sherrill Milnes. Perhaps it was because I was starting to feel unwell, but I didn’t get much out of this class, and was actually anxious for it to end. I didn’t learn anything new from the Marilyn Horne master class in April, but it wasn’t until later that I realized it because I was still gaining some new perspective. I didn’t feel that way this time. I felt like this one was more about him than about the young singers he was tutoring. I am not sure to what extent this is due to the fact that my roommate, who had seen him before, told me that he was full of himself, or whether it was simply the reality of it, but I didn’t come away from that class feeling I had gained much of anything.

I skipped the last breakout session of the day. I’d had some interest in attending the class about countertenors, but I really just didn’t feel well, so I went back to my room to sleep for an hour and a half so that I would feel fresh for the Dawn Upshaw recital this evening. Mission accomplished.

As we entered the Ryman Auditorium, I spied someone else that looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place her. Just a couple minutes later, she approached me to say hello. It was Kitty Eberle, another one of my professors from the SVI in 2005. The world of voice professionals really is a small world. I am amazed now how many people I know when I look around the room at this convention. I have met so many wonderful people and reconnected with many others.

The recital was beautiful. It was a private recital. Our NATS membership filled less than half of the historic Ryman Auditorium. Had they opened it to the public, it would have quickly sold out. Ms. Upshaw was very down-to-earth and conversational. Like many singers whose performances I have greatly enjoyed this week, she made singing look incredibly, deceptively easy. I have been desperately wishing my students could see and hear the performances I have seen and heard this week because they epitomize the things I keep telling them about the art of performing – and to experience it for themselves would be worth more than a thousand words. The highlight for me was when she sang my all-time favorite German Lied, “Die Bekehrte,” by Hugo Wolf.

When we boarded the bus to go to the recital, it was the first time I’d been out of the resort in over two days. I felt like I was an institutional patient being let out into the “real world” for a sojourn. Walking back through the “outside” (not “outside outside,” remember), I couldn’t help feeling again like we were in a Martian biosphere. I actually really like it, but it’s still strange.

Another person approached me this evening when we got off the bus to say that she was impressed with my voice when I sang as an impromptu subject in Kittie Verdolini’s workshop yesterday. The farther we get from the time of that event, the more it floors me that people remember me from it and care enough to say something. She also said I was very brave. I had to laugh…crazy is more like it!

I think the other reason such praise has meant so much to me and struck me as so peculiar is because I have been struggling with my voice so much lately – not so much with the voice itself, as with my energy level and my limited amount of time to devote to singing when I have been so swamped with teaching. Therefore, the last thing I would expect from people who really know “good singing” when they hear it, is praise.

My personal goal for this trip, which continues to be brushed aside by more imminent concerns, has been to redefine the role of singing in my life because it has become such a source of frustration for me. I have been very busy as a music teacher and it takes a lot out of me, such that when all is said and done, the last thing I want to do is sing. Because singing is my career, it no longer qualifies as leisure; even though I still love doing it, it definitely falls into the category of work. Don’t get me wrong – I consider myself incredibly blessed to do something I love as my work, but work is still work, and it is tiring, and one needs time away from it in order to refresh.

I think the source of my frustration is that, while I have redefined my desired career path to be that of a teacher rather than a full-time performer, I have not adjusted my expectations of myself as a performer to accommodate that shift. I know that a teacher of music must continue to perform in order to remain in touch with the artist within, but it only makes sense that if one is now devoting a great deal of energy to honing the art of teaching, something else has to give. That time and energy doesn’t come out of nowhere! Sort of a “conservation of matter” kind of philosophy.

I feel a sense of peace, relief and accomplishment at having unraveled that persistent mystery, but now comes perhaps the hardest part… accepting the change. Lowering my personal expectations of myself as a singer feels so much like quitting or giving up, even though I know that’s not the reality. I will still improve and grow as a singer, just not as quickly or perhaps as fully. This part of the puzzle will take some genuine effort and struggle, but at least I feel like I have a better understanding of the situation, and that should begin to relieve some of my anxiety.

The remaining item of note for today was that my roommate’s niece was born in San Fransisco while we were riding “home” from the recital on the bus.